[In the following essay, Dundas analyzes the use of figures of classical myth in masques, arguing that they added an aspect of beauty and enrichment to the performances.]

The flight into the imagination which was implicit in the whole production of court masques took courage from two sources, classical allusion and moral significance. However fantastic the thinly spun plots or however marvellous the stage machinery and costuming, these received some sort of anchoring to reality through recognizable myths and morally sound principles. The didactic no less than the political function of these myths has been stressed in recent criticism; in the words of Stephen Orgel, the masque fictions served to create “heroic roles for the leaders of society.”¹ Such an interpretation tends to emphasize the political and ethical goals of the masque, its “Platonic Politics,” at the expense perhaps of the aesthetic purpose, the kind of enjoyment offered by an art that is above all ornamental—an art that, for the sake of pleasure, imposes a decorative form even upon the moral message and makes pattern an imperative. To this requirement, myth itself, without losing dignity, must conform; so Daedalus as dancing master instructs the court in the virtuous life, “And doth in sacred harmony comprise / His precepts.”²

Perhaps the true purpose of the masques lies not altogether in their political or Platonic significance but in the beauty with which they adorned the lives of king and court. To associate the King with Neptune or Jupiter is not only to supply him with a heroic mould for future action but to enrich the present moment for him and the rest of the audience by allusion to a world of delightful imagination. When Ben Jonson speaks of the “sound meats” and the “more remov'd mysteries” that his masques have to offer,³ he is, like any Renaissance writer, pointing to the meaning of his work. As artist, he sees himself as the servant of truth, but to limit this truth to either political or moral messages is to engage in an almost commercial literalizing of the value in a work of art. A survey of the classical mythology in the masques could reveal more poetry and less expediency than current criticism is in the habit of discovering. Even the sometimes complex allegories serve for delight; they are the aliquid salis, without which the masque would be vapid. We need, I believe, to redefine the seriousness of the genre, to place in perspective both political and moral goals instead of making them the sole justification for so much extravagance. In other words, we need to recover some of the playfulness involved in this particular type of play-acting, in which gorgeously attired courtiers move in an elaborately choreographed world of fantasy based on that classical past to which the Renaissance had given its heart.

We may not fully realize to what extent classical mythology was viewed as the subject matter of beauty, but rhetoricians and poets knew this, as did the great Renaissance painters. Fracastoro, for example, says that the only kind of writing that is absolutely beautiful is about gods and heroes.⁴ Once freed from the medieval necessity of posing as personifications of good and evil, the mythological figures could appear clothed in their own beauty of form. So it was that Rubens aspired to bring the classical gods to life in his painting, not merely by imitating the ancient statues but by seeing the spirit imprisoned in the stone and depicting that. In a remarkable statement in his De imitatione statuarum, he notes that “many neophytes and even some experts do not distinguish stuff from form, stone from figure, nor the exigencies of the marble from its artistic use. … Whoever can make this distinction with wise discretion should indeed welcome the statues in a loving embrace; for what can we, decadent children of this erring century, accomplish? What vile spirit keeps us weaklings fettered to the ground, far away from that heroic stature and natural insight? We may still be afflicted by the darkness in which our forefathers lived; maybe the Gods have suffered us to fall from past errors into worse ones, or, to our irreparable loss, to be weakened by a decaying world. …”⁵ For Renaissance writers, as well as artists, the classical deities belong to a nobler, brighter, happier era, so that to invoke their presence is to illuminate a darkened world.

But within the slender proportions of the court masque, it is clearly impossible to bring the gods fully to life; for “the short bravery of the night,” they can scarcely appear in all their power. Instead of crushing or strangling his enemies, Hercules defeats them with a word and thereby also lives up to the calm dignity of Heroic Virtue. Venus is neither as voracious nor as petty—I almost said, as in real life—as in classical literature, but searches for her missing Cupid with no more than a feigned jealousy:

But he not yet returning, I'm in fear
Some gentle Grace or innocent beauty here
Be taken with him; or he hath surprised
A second Psyche, and lives here disguised.(6)

We cannot have the power of the gods displayed without a dramatic situation; where none exists, these deities can only appear in quotation marks. But what has been lost in strength and power has been gained in gracefulness. However tempting it may be to compare the allegorical paintings of Rubens with the mythologies of the masques,⁷ the differences are just as important. Iconographic similarities may suggest a commonalty of interest by telling us how readily seventeenth-century artists could mingle myth and history, but they do not dictate a common style. Even decoration, such as the Whitehall ceiling, has in Rubens' hands a grandeur which the aesthetics of the masque do not permit. It is only fitting that the performance of masques in the new Banqueting House should have ended once his paintings were put in place. The lesser had to give way to the greater.

Attenuated as the masque gods are, we shall not find their value by comparing them with the paintings of Rubens, but we may perhaps find it by considering these gods as the indoor inhabitants of a stately home, much as the nymphs and satyrs were the outdoor inhabitants of the surrounding parkland. Jonson himself draws the comparison in his poem “To Sir Robert Wroth”:

Thus Pan, and Sylvane, having had their rites,
                    Comus puts in,
for new delights;
And fills thy open hall with mirth, and cheere,
                    As if in Saturnes
raigne it were;
Apollo's harpe, and Hermes lyre resound,
                    Nor are the Muses
strangers found.(8)

As in Milton's “L'Allegro,” the virtuous mind need be no stranger to revelry, and in the state of innocence Comus himself can appear as the amiable youth that he once was, replete with wine and laughter. The idea of the Golden Age provides not only a context for the performance of masques but also supplies the motivating theme:

                                         … the golden vein
Of Saturn's age is here broke out again.(9)

Every masque celebrates the return of the Golden Age, when gods walked with mortals.

Of course, the gods are a conventional feature of the language of courtly society. Shakespeare gives a delightful parody of this notion in his Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, where the drunken Sly is offered all the perquisites of a lord:

Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.

(11. 49-53)

In this passage, where several of the most popular myths are alluded to, the classical gods play their part as a decorative subject matter, intrinsically beautiful and suitable to the tastes of a cultivated patron. As Jonson's poem to Wroth suggests, the gods are the companions of leisure: with them one can play as with so many rainbows, catching each gleam of fancy.

In the masques, too, classical mythology makes an appeal to aristocratic tastes, but now with a moral significance which links the use of myth to the tradition of pageant with its allegorical figures and right-thinking gods. For example, when Jonson wrote his early entertainment known as The Penates (1604), he had Mercury apologize to the king and queen for the rude antics of Pan and his earthy amours, which he calls “but the lightest escapes of our deities.” This is probably as close as we get in either masques or entertainments to the bawdier stories of the gods. Here the allusion to Pan is appropriate within the context of an Arcadian landscape: “This place, whereon you are now advanced (by the mighty power of poetry, and help of a faith that can remove mountains) is the Arcadian hill Cyllene. …”¹⁰ Only with the help of such a faith and the power of poetry, it seems, can the gods be made to inhabit a world now, alas, deprived of them. What more joyous experience, then, for courtiers than to engage in the bringing back of this most pleasurable aspect of classical antiquity, especially when it can be reconciled with the moral values of their own civilization?

And here, by the way, it should be noted that the compatibility of pleasure with virtue was asserted not only by humanist philosophers such as Ficino, but also by other moralizing poets besides Jonson. Spenser, for example, gives Pleasure a place in his earthly paradise, the Garden of Adonis:

Pleasure, that doth both gods and men aggrate,
Pleasure, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche late.(11)

In the ideal union of love and the human soul, pleasure is born and mortals find themselves in the company of gods. It is under exactly the same conditions of blessedness that the court masques present an achieved vision, in which human beings can participate in divine celebrations.

In bringing back the gods with the help of faith and “the mighty power of poetry,” Jonson has as well the assistance of a nighttime setting for his masques, with candles, music, and rich costume to invite fancy:

From air, from cloud, from dreams, from toys,
                    To sounds, to sense, to love, to joys. …(12)

The invocation to Fancy in The Vision of Delight shows an awareness and acceptance of the licensed space granted to the dreaming mind “in such a night as this.” Not for nothing do the words of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice come to mind: the mythological allusions crowd the page when the atmosphere is as right as it is for Jessica and Lorenzo in their playful mood of love.¹³ Jonson's figure of Delight, too, remarks on the festive moment: “our sports are of the humorous night.” Together night, dream, and fancy invite the gods.

It is not a combination that necessarily spells Platonic symmetries; indeed, “the humorous night” has its fill of absurdity. Supreme example of the comedy which links gods and men is love, the theme of so many masques and entertainments. The court, “circular, and perfect,” may become an academy of love; the king and queen, “the whole School-Divinitie of Love”;¹⁴ and for the moment, an idea of perfect felicity may be presented to the viewers. But the absurdity of love figures in a number of masques, where the illusions of men become linked with the illusions woven by the gods. The Challenge at Tilt shows the ridiculous sight of two cupids, Eros and Anteros, striving for the palm, when both are required for the mutual love celebrated by Hymen. Similarly, Lovers Made Men treats as literal the death-dealing blows of love, so that only the ghosts of former lovers appear until these are restored to life by reason. Yet the absurdity and the beauty are as close together as in A Mid-summer-Night's Dream, where imagination or fancy also governs men's actions to the wonder and amusement of the audience:

                                                                                They are the gentle forms
Of lovers tossed upon those frantic seas
Whence Venus sprung.(15)

Perhaps a courtly drama should not be too bound up with the grosser appetites but instead look at them through the same telescopic lens with which it views the nymphs and satyrs. One does not criticize what happens in the masque because it is too remote, but one is asked to enjoy the dance along the labyrinthine ways of the imagination into which the real world enters only by courtesy of the muses.

Yet Jonson's invocation to fancy, festive though it is, is not intended to be merely self-indulgent. To make more sense of man's dreams is to show how they may be brought down to earth through the practice of such virtues as temperance and love. He is constantly asserting that human imperfection need not stand in the way of a vision of perfection. Whether it is the “round, firm clasp of nature” or one of his many spherical images for the beauty of human life—“the court, which is circular / And perfect”—he testifies to his own joy in a vision of what is both natural and good. When his gods make their descent to earth, it is to bring order to the confusion of human life:

It is no dream; you all do wake and see.
Behold who comes! far-shooting Phoebus, he
That can both hurt and heal; and with his voice
Rear towns, and make societies rejoice;
That taught the muses all their harmony,
And men the tuneful art of augury.
Apollo stoops, and when a god descends,
May mortals think he hath no vulgar ends.(16)

Or the gods come

                                                  Regarding still what heaven should do,
And not what earth deserveth.(17)

What has been termed “Jonson's clever exploitation of the gods”¹⁸ denies him at least a portion of his true feelings about these gods, who have their own identity which must be respected even while they make their appearance within the limits of this particular earthly stage. As a philosophical justification for bringing the gods upon stage we could, of course, turn to the writings of Renaissance Neoplatonists, but for our purpose, we may find the question more immediately discussed in Samuel Daniel's masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. The goddess Iris, “the daughter of wonder,” explains that the eternal ideas have been “cast in the imagination of piety,” that the divine Powers “clothed themselves with these appearances” in order that they might be better understood than “in that wide and incomprehensible volume of nature.”¹⁹ It is as if the classical deities, “those beautiful characters of sense,” were the natural language for the eternal ideas, supplemented by the personifications created by a later era and so authoritatively described in Ripa's Iconologia, on which Jonson in particular drew freely. His conservatism in grounding his inventions “upon antiquity and solid learning” is in keeping with the commonly held Renaissance view that not only the recognizability but also the power of allegorical figures somehow depended upon their correct depiction.²⁰ In fact, his concern goes beyond pedantry to show profound respect, even piety, for the way in which the eternal ideas have been traditionally clothed. He will cite Philostratus on “the inducing of many Cupids” in his Haddington Masque, or Athenaeus on the overseeing role of Silenus in his Oberon, or explain his presentation of Apollo by saying that “Antiquity reported four extraordinary skills” for him. On the personification of vices in The Masque of Queens he says, “Now for the personal presentation of them, the authority in poetry is universal.” It is interesting that poetry itself becomes his authority for his own fictions. Thus, in justifying the bringing of persons of different eras on stage together in this same masque, he offers not only the defense that nothing is more proper or more natural, but “if I would fly to the all-daring power of poetry, where could I not take sanctuary?”²¹ His earlier reference to “the mighty power of poetry” in The Penates also linked the gods and poetry. The two belong to that higher sphere through which man is enabled to understand and order this earthly life.

Indeed Jonson does not use the gods merely to make the monarch or the masquers more important but to join heaven and earth in one joyful vision. The masquers may be “at the heart of the masque,”²² but they are so by the grace of the gods. They are released from the bondage of winter; they assist Love or play the part of lovers; they are, in short, the revelation of what the good and the beautiful have to offer in the happy union of gods and men. When Apollo speaks of the king as “the love and care of all the gods,”²³ this is less a subordination of the gods than of the king to the ideal of kingship. Justice and religion, Jonson notes in his Discoveries, “are the only two Attributes make Kings a kinne to Gods.”²⁴

To speak of the masques as political is almost to suggest that they are solely devoted to the propaganda of kingship, but the mythologizing of the monarch is precisely what removes the taint of adulation and renders a service to truth. How can a king take seriously such words as those which say that his subjects are rapt above the moon in contemplation of his virtues? The myths may be the standard language of courtly compliment—for example, in the poem to William, Earl of Newcastle, “You shew'd like Perseus upon Pegasus”²⁵—but the statuesque dignity and classical beauty of the analogy shape the subject into ornamental form. Similarly, the king, who may be compared to Neptune or Jupiter, is in effect cast in the ideal mould of art. And might one not say that for Jonson art is the goal of life? The shaping impulse begins with love and ends with beauty:

So love, emergent out of chaos, brought
                    The world to light!
And gently moving on the waters, wrought
                    All forms to sight!(26)

Commenting on his own line “It was for beauty that the world was made,” Jonson notes that it was “An agreeing opinion both with divines and philosophers that the great artificer, in love with his own Idea, did therefore frame the world.”²⁷ The task of the earthly artist likewise can only be to follow beauty and to transform mortal weakness into an image of perfection, for which the gods supply the model.

But he was always careful to distinguish outer beauty and inner, show and matter. When he told the court in his preface to Cynthia's Revels that “no man can call that lovely which is not also venerable,” that it is only “a mind shining through any sute” that is the true beauty, we know that he could not settle merely for the appearance of perfection.²⁸ The spectators of a masque may wish “their bodies all were eye,” but when he explains his conception of poetry, it is as affording “Words above action; matter, above words.”²⁹ As D. J. Gordon has shown in his valuable article on Jones and Jonson, words are a clothing of invention no less than painting is, and Jonson was engaging in a traditional paragone—albeit strengthened by professional jealousy—rather than differing radically from Jones' own position.³⁰ His various poems that deal with the rivalry of poet and painter put the emphasis on inward beauty as his true subject:

My mirror is more subtile, cleere, refin'd
                    And lookes, and gives the beauties of the mind.(31)

Yet as poet, he still needs the sensuous metaphor—“Those beautiful characters of sense”—to manifest “the beauties of the mind.”

Language, beautiful language is the softener, the way prepared for good images, in their turn, to enter the mind. Jonson states this himself in his passage on poetry in Discoveries: he calls it “a dulcet, and gentle Philosophy which leades on, and guides us by hand to Action, with a ravishing delight and incredible Sweetness.”³² His most immediate and famous predecessor in emphasizing the delightful teaching of poetry is, of course, Sir Philip Sidney, who, deferring to Plato and Cicero, says that “who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” and that it is the poet who “sets her out to make her more lovely in her holiday apparel.”³³ Could there be more appropriate words to describe the court masques than “holiday apparel”? But both poets speak of “ravishing” the listener, and this word reminds us that mythological allusions were aids to enthrallment, not only through their intrinsic wonder but also through their beauty of association. Sidney used them freely in his Arcadia as a way of making his images more beautiful and delightful, but for an example from Ben Jonson, we may turn to a seemingly trivial passage addressed to the ladies of the court, urging them to join the revels. It illustrates how mythological allusions may enhance and make more wonderful even the most splendid costuming:

Proteus. Come, noble nymphs,
and do not hide
The joys for which you so provide.
Saron. If not to mingle with
the men,
What do you here? Go home again.
Portunus. Your dressings
do confess
By what we see, so curious parts
Of Pallas' and Arachne's art,
That you could mean no less.
Proteus. Why do you wear
the silkworm's toils,
Or glory in the shellfish spoils,
Or strive to show the grains of ore
That you have gathered on the shore
Whereof to make a stock
To graft the greener emerald on,
Or any better-watered stone?
Saron. Or ruby of the rock?
Proteus. Why do you smell
of ambergris,
Of which was formed Neptune's niece,
The queen of love, unless you can,
Like sea-born Venus, love a man?(34)

The experience of the moment, as in so much of Jonson's occasional poetry, is patterned through classical myth to become part of a transcendent order of existence.

But for such poets as Jonson, there is no patterning without increased moral significance. The emblematic eyes which are embroidered on the dress of Truth in his masque Hymenaei both decorate and signify “her sight in mysteries.” Just so, the delights of the masque are intended to adorn the courtly evening and also to reveal how beauty may become a reality in this world. There is no conflict between the charm of the spectacle and its didactic significance; after all, Elizabethan and Jacobean court life was shot through with its own emblematic language of decoration—in dress, in pageantry, in household furnishings.³⁵ So widespread in fact was the use of significant pattern in these circles that they could scarcely conceive of entertainment without symbolic meaning. That, however, is no reason for us to emphasize the meaning at the expense of the playfulness.

Nor should we misinterpret Jonson's concern that his fanciful confections should be recognized as “sound meats.” In an era which favored “wit,” complexity of meaning was part of that complexity of pattern considered to be artistically desirable. Thus, for example, Juno as Unio, the patronness of marriage, possesses a beauty of significance which enhances her physical presence, like the mind shining through the body.³⁶ But the play on Juno's name reminds us that masque writers in general felt the challenge of finding a witty device as the mainspring of their slender plot. It might be a classical saying such as Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, which could be reinterpreted to show how love is in reality vindicated by temperance, as Lent is followed by spring.³⁷ The search for wit is endless, and it is upon some small point of wit that most of these little dramas turn, if they have any point at all, not upon some epic or tragic or broadly comic theme. The slightness of the masque as a genre is matched by the epigrammatic quality of its message. What it says may be put into a sentence because no grandly human drama is enacted, but the puppet-gods make their appearance upon cue. Yet for Jonson, the witty device becomes an example of the labyrinth, which is not only an image for human error but for all art:

Then, as all actions of mankind
                    Are but a labyrinth or maze,
So let your dances be entwined,
                    Yet not perplex men unto gaze. …(38)

The labyrinth of art requires an intricate relationship of parts, a contrast between the roughness of the antimasque and the smooth sweetness of the main masque, in order that the variety of life may be fittingly mirrored. As nature moves into art—“her whole body set in art”—so we are shown that human life too can become art when “the lines of good and fair” are rightly drawn.

In the masques, art triumphs over life just as the figures of the main masque triumph over those of the antimasque. But the mythological figures also triumph over their earthly exemplars by turning these mortals into an idealized art form. Perhaps for the sake of both the dulce and the utile of the genre, “this night's ornament” has to leave the arena of human passions and choose instead a decorative, symbolic mode of expression. If Jonson's use of classical myth seems a little too much like Echo seeking “airy garments” to clothe her thoughts, that is simply part of the charm of these allusions. If we go to them expecting the fullness of life that we find in Rubens' paintings, we shall be disappointed; but if we go to them willing to see how the strength of Jonson's mind has disguised itself in an elegant calligraphy, we may yet find something rich and strange in these “court hieroglyphics.” Doubtless Jonson was hoping for a response to his masques not unlike Cynthia's when she remarked on the first masque and devices presented to her in Cynthia's Revels:

Not without wonder, nor without delight,
Mine eyes have viewed, in contemplation's depth
This work of wit, divine and excellent. …(39)

Art, in this familiar Neoplatonic language, becomes an immortal mirror into which the soul gazes and discovers itself. So the pleasures of the senses give way to the higher pleasures of the spirit; “those beautiful characters of sense” transform themselves once more into the eternal ideas and become even more beautiful. Despite all propagandistic motives, the aesthetic point of view prevails, and the conscience of the artist is at rest.

Notes

1. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, 1975), p. 38. Cf. the discussion of “Platonic Politics” in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), I, 49-73.

2. Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 11. 219-20. All quotations from Jonson's masques are taken from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969).

3. Hymenaei, 11. 16-17 and 24.

4. Girolamo Fracastoro, Naugerius, sive de Poetica Dialogus, trans. Ruth Kelso, (Urbana, Ill., 1924,), p. 64.

5. Rubens, cited in Wolfgang Stechow, Rubens and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 26.

6. The Haddington Masque, 11. 56-59.

7. The comparison is implicit, for example, in the first two essays of D. J. Gordon's Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975).

8. The Forrest, III, 11. 47-52. Quotations from Jonson's poems are taken from The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, (New York, 1963).

9. Prince Henry's Barriers, 11. 333-34.

10. The Penates, 1. 184 and 11. 60-63. Quotations from Jonson's Entertainments are taken from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), Vol. VII.

11. The Faerie Queene, III.vi.50. For further discussion of pleasure as a Renaissance value, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London, 1968), especially the essays on Botticelli's Primavera and on “The Medal of Pico della Mirandola.”

12. The Vision of Delight, 11. 9-10.

13. That these are stories of tragic love and love betrayed prepares the way for Jessica's teasing remark: “In such a night / Did young Lorenzo swear he lov'd her well, / Stealing her soul with many vows of faith, / And ne'er a true one.” As Lorenzo forgives her “slanders,” so Jessica and Portia will forgive the mock infidelities of their newly wed husbands. Comic reconciliation prevails.

14. Love's Welcome at Bolsover, 11. 136-37 and 11. 161-62.

15. Lovers Made Men, 11. 28-30.

16. The Masque of Augurs, 11. 251-59.

17. The Golden Age Restored, 11. 21-22.

18. John C. Meagher, Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques (Notre Dame, Ind., 1966), pp. 48-49.

19. The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, ed. Joan Rees, in A Book of Masques (Cambridge, 1967), 11. 260-65 and 400-03.

20. See E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae,” in Symbolic Images (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 176. For the sources of Jonson's allegorical figures, see Allan H. Gilbert, The Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham, N. C., 1948).

21. See Jonson's marginal glosses, reprinted in the Appendix to Orgel's edition of the Masques. For The Masque of Beauty, see note to 1. 200 (p. 513); for Oberon, see note to 1. 33 (p. 548); for The Masque of Queens, see note to 1. 104 (p. 530), and to 1. 499 (p. 547).

22. Meagher, p. 55.

23. The Masque of Augurs, 1. 275.

24. Discoveries, in Herford and Simpson edition of Ben Jonson, VIII, 603.

25. Under-wood, 55, 1. 7. There is an obvious parallel between such descriptions and allegorical portraiture. See Edgar Wind, “Studies in Allegorical Portraiture, I,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1 (1937-38), 138-62.

26. Love's Triumph through Callipolis, 11. 135-38.

27. The Masque of Beauty, 1. 243; for Jonson's note on this line, see p. 513 in Orgel edition.

28. Address to the Court, prefixed to Cynthia's Revels.

29. Prologue to Cynthia's Revels, 1. 20.

30. D. J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 12 (1949), 152-78; reprinted in Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, pp. 77-101.

31. The Forrest, XIII, 43-44.

32. Discoveries, p. 636.

33. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis, 1970), p. 49.

34. Neptune's Triumph, 11. 316-35.

35. See, for example, Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), and Frances Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 4-25.

36. Hymenaei, 11. 208-09. For a discussion, see D. J. Gordon, “Hymenaei: Jonson's Masque of Union,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 8 (1945), 107-45; reprinted in The Renaissance Imagination, pp. 157-184.

37. Thomas Nabbes, The Spring's Glory, ed. John Russell Brown, in A Book of Masques, pp. 317-36.

38. Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 11. 232-35.

39. Cynthia's Revels, V.viii.1-3.